Google Dance

Google Dance is an out-dated slang term used to describe the period of time in which Google used to rebuild its rankings, and as a result of this rebuilding, rankings of Web sites on Google's SERP may fluctuate in order during a several day period. The "Google Dance" would happen anywhere up to 36 times per year, however in 2003 Google begin updating its index on a weekly basis, which all but eliminated the Google Dance.

"Google Dance can be defined as an update of the search engine giant for indexing the results, recalculating the Page Ranks of every page the bot has crawled."

Approximately once a month, Google update their index by recalculating the Page Ranks of each of the web pages that they have crawled. The period during the update is known as the Google dance.

Because of the nature of Page Rank, the calculations need to be performed about 40 times and, because the index is so large, the calculations take several days to complete. During this period, the search results fluctuate; sometimes minute-by minute. It is because of these fluctuations that the term, Google Dance, was coined. The dance usually takes place sometime during the last third of each month.

Google has two other servers that can be used for searching. The search results on them also change during the monthly update and they are part of the Google dance.

For the rest of the month, fluctuations sometimes occur in the search results, but they should not be confused with the actual dance. They are due to Google's fresh crawl and to what is known "Ever flux".